People have been encouraging me to share my anti-akrasia tricks, but it feels inappropriate to dedicate a top-level post solely to unproven techniques that work for some person and may not work for others, so:
Go ahead and share your anti-akrasia tricks!
Let's make it an open thread where we just share what works and what doesn't, without worrying (yet) about having to explain tricks with deep theories, or designing proper experiments to verify them. However, if you happen to have a theory or a proposed experiment in mind, please share.
Bragging is fine, but please share the failures of your techniques as well – they are just as valuable, if not more.
Note to readers – before you read the comments and try the tricks, keep in mind that the techniques below are not yet proven supported or explained by proper experiments, and are not yet backed by theory. They may work for their authors, but are not guaranteed to work for you, so try them at your own risk. It would be even better to read the following posts before rushing to try the tricks:
My results:
Elimination of two my primary addictions -- PC gaming, mostly TF2 and WoW AH moneymaking (100% elimination for both so far), and aimless internet surfing (now reduced to about 10% of its former glory.)
Significant reduction of procrastination time in general (ironically, I'm procrastinating right now -- I'm posting at LessWrong :)
Being able to actually act according to my current better judgement, with verifiable results in the real world. This is an addiction in itself.
My tricks:
(Obligatory note of caution -- these are tricks, they are not supported by experimental results, I've been using them for just about 3 months, they aren't tested under serious stress / pressure, I have no deep theories to explain why they work, and the evidence I offer is purely anecdotal.)
Determine what is your current better judgment. This is critical -- I noticed that I hesitate to trick myself into doing anything I don't consider to be relevant to my goal.
Regularly asking yourself: "is what I'm doing at the moment advancing me toward the desired state of reality"? If the answer is "no", you're procrastinating. The danger here is the possibility of rationalizing yourself into believing that your current activity does advance you.
80/20 elimination, Tim Ferris / Pareto style (I'm skeptical about the rest of Tim's book, but his Elimination chapter is pure gold).
Parkinson's law (work expands to fill the time allotted). Again, Tim Ferris has some advice on it -- basically, it boils down to scheduling the most important things (in the 80/20 sense) first, with aggressive deadlines.
PJ Eby's hidden meaning of "just do it". He considers the article to be outdated, but its key paragraph worked wonders for me. Basically, "just do it" = "don't do anything else". In its pure form, "not doing anything else" is too macho for me, so I leave a line of retreat for myself -- I permit myself to eat, think about anything (not just the task), walk, have sex, but no Internet surfing unless it's on-topic, no doodling on paper unless it's on-topic, etc.
Self-priming -- I try to expose myself to stimuli related to my current task, and to shield myself from irrelevant stimuli, no matter how pleasant (e.g. I run away from my toddler daughter, because prolonged exposure to cuteness tends to totally ruin my ability to work efficiently :)
Begin now. For example, if you need to do some stuff in Excel, just open an empty spreadsheet and type in the table header. Just staring at this makes you better at spreadsheets and your task -- your mind pulls linked concepts to the fast-access cache, without your consent, and you don't need to do anything. Probably related to Joel Spolsky's Fire and Motion.
Mindless repetition of things like "I want to make the best X in the world" (where X stands for my current goal). I always correct myself when I say "must' instead of "want". I've been doing this for at least a decade, and it seems to work (possibly it's related to cached selves, monoidealism and self-affirmation.)
No multitasking. Tim Ferris advises not to assign more than two mission-critical items per day. Joel Spolsky has a good article on this -- Human Task Switches Considered Harmful.
Allowing myself to procrastinate up to a certain time. For example, I look at the clock, it shows 10:24. I tell myself, "I'll procrastinate up to 10:30, and then open a spreadsheet and type the header into it". The technique seems to be similar to the willpower hax that Eliezer uses for getting out of bed.
Failures:
I've been using the most of these techniques for just 3 months, but I've already observed some cases when they cease working. The number one cause of my procrastination (and acting against my better judgment in general) turns out to be social pressure (my established relations with co-workers, friends, etc.)
Example: I determined that my current best judgment is to remain at my home office and spend the entire day researching X, but then I start to worry that my business partner will think that I don't dedicate enough time to our company, so I feel forced to go to the "work" office and spend all day there on less important stuff.
I first started to pay attention to the relationship of social factors and akrasia after PJ Eby mentioned it in our earlier discussion. His term (psychosomatic marker, if I remember correctly) didn't stick with me, but I noticed that when I procrastinate, I almost always find that a social pressure is involved.
Also, the tricks are far less effective when I'm tired, but this seems to be far less important than the social pressures.
Remains to be seen: